Goosebumps Series 2010, Book One
by Elliot Pole
Summary: Written by R.L. Steinem, this series is to follow in the same vein as the original. This was not published until 2010. Instead of focusing on different characters in each book, this series details the alien Sherri Malice and her friend Jared Putnam.
1. Prologue

**Goosebumps Series 2010**

**Book One: El Spithor Vulthus (In the Belly of the Beast)**

**Prologue**

This book was published in March 2010. If you are reading this in 2008 or 2009, it is merely a figment of your imagination. The author, Ralph Lilliput Steinem, did not even come up with the _idea _until January 1, 2010. Thus, there is no way you could be reading this any earlier than that…

Unless you are a victim of a time-warp. Yes, that's what you are. And you are thinking at this moment, "I've got to get through this book fast, because I'm really waiting to read book four, _Hitler's Comeback, _but my friends told me that unlike the original Goosebumps series, this 2010 series uses the same characters over and over…"

In that you would be correct. Jared Putnam and Sherri Malice are R.L. Steinem's favorite characters. He loves them as much as his own children, which he had aborted because his girlfriend was an ugly pig and he didn't want the kids to emerge in the world as ugly pigs and never have anyone date them…

Now, if this book was written in March 2010, and you reading this in 2008, you are thinking, "R.L. Steinem will put events that happened in 2009 in his book! Then I'll tell my friends, and they won't believe me, and I'll force them to bet $500.00, and I'll be rich when this stuff comes true!"

We at Stafford Publishing hate to puncture the euphoria you are most likely feeling at this moment, but the fact is that R.L. Steinem does not care about current events. It does not matter to him that on October 12, 2009, at 3:04 P.M., a plane crashed into the Sears Tower, manned by Al Qaeda devotees. He doesn't care about the introduction of the pink M&M in July 2009, or the fact that Obama was assassinated three months ago, and Joe Biden is our current President. It's not his concern that Michael Phelps disappeared off the face of the Earth, and now people are seeing Michael Phelps all over the place…Egypt, Sudan, Australia, their mother-in-law's backyard. There are many other things he does not give a d--- about, such as the fact that Miley Cyrus has HIV, or that international law dictates that two plus two equal five. In short, he doesn't care about what's happening now.

So, you wonder, "Why the heck am I reading this? Oh yeah, the Hitler book…is it true that a necromancer revives Hitler in book four?" The answer is yes. Adolf Hitler will come back to life in book four. But, if you jump ahead to book four, you won't know anything about Jared Putnam and Sherri Malice. Wikipedia won't have any information on them for some time to come. So you must read this and the next two books first, and then _finally _you'll be where you want to be.

By the way, is that broccoli on your teeth? Books don't like to be stared at by people who aren't kempt. Go brush your hair, take a bath, then sit down and slog through the following volume.


	2. Chapter 1

**El Spithor Vulthus (In the Belly of the Beast)**

**Chapter One**

"Sherriiiiiii!" my sister called.

"Nora, I'm busy!" I shouted at her through my door.

"But Mother needs you to clean the toilets. Especially mine."

"I'm not your servant!"

"I will turn your door into chocolate and eat it, then sit on you if you don't go clean my toilet."

I laughed, though feeling rage surge through me at the same time. Nora couldn't turn my door into chocolate, though she always threatened to. But she was sixteen, and I only twelve. If she sat on me, it would be unpleasant.

"Fine!" I shouted. "I'll clean your stupid toilet."

I opened the door, and Nora was smiling mischievously at me. It was no wonder our last name was Malice. But I, at least, was a nice girl, or so I considered myself to be.

I went to get the toilet cleaning supplies out of a hall closet, wondering why Mom didn't just buy those Swift mop things I saw in commercials on TV.

"Sherri!" Mom's voice reverbated down the hallway. "The phone rang. It's for you."

I happily threw the cleaning supplies on the floor, spilling a spray for removing dirt from porcelain. Then I opened the door and ran to the living room, where the phone was situated.

"Hello?" I said.

"Is your refrigerator running?" said a voice I did not recognize.

"I think so…"

"Well, you better go and catch it!" The person on the other end hung up.

I stared at the phone for a minute, allowing the irritating dial tone to keep going. "That makes no sense," I said, putting it back on its cradle.

The phone rang again immediately. I hoped that it was not that same person. Why would somebody waste time to call people and tell them things as dumb as that?

I picked it up. "I will call the cops if you say that again," I said, before the person who called could speak.

"Sherri, what are you talking about? It's me, Jared."

"Oh, Jared. Sorry. Somebody called and asked about my refrigerator running…"

"Ugh, prank calls. I hate them."

"What's a prank call?" I asked.

"You're kidding. You never heard of them? Sometimes I think you come from another planet." I twiddled my thumbs as he said this. In fact, I _did _come from another planet. Another universe, actually. I didn't even know what a telephone was a year ago, when Mom, Nora, and I took Anglicized names two months after ending up on Earth. "A prank call is when someone calls you and say something stupid, like 'I think you have Prince Charles in a can.' People who prank call either don't know who they're calling, picking a random number in the phone book, or call someone from school they wish to irritate. They also might call the police and tell them there's a burglary on 49th Street, but when the cops get there, nothing has happened."

"Oh, I see. But what's the _point _of that?"

Jared shrugged. I could hear him shrugging over the phone. According to Mom's research, humans could not do any such thing. Because it was so natural for me, I wondered how the minds of human beings could be so dim that they could not detect these vibrations. "Some people get kicks out of it," he said. "But listen, I wanted to call you about Mr. Aryoung's homework. Who was the leader of the British forces in the Battle of 1812?"

"Can't you use the Internet?"

"I tried Wikipedia, but it just says that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was it, but Roosevelt was President in the 1940's…I don't see how he could've been around in 1812."

"Well, I don't know, Jared."

"Okay, what does manifest destiny mean?"

"Look in the textbook."

"Sometimes I think you don't know anything."

My face turned dark-red, and for once I was glad that humans were unable to detect this. I knew plenty of stuff…that the logarithm principles of duck mathematics are a square root of pi argunum, which every ten-year-old on the planet Pacifico can tell you. I knew that the temperature of the Gorbal Jutii, which gives us light during the day, was 36,000 degrees Portinat. I knew that a nimforc (a type of animal with three tails and a giant mouth that resembles a toothbrush) could run at speeds of 95 yicc per quarthrel, which I have not yet been able to translate into Earthian acceleration, nor did I believe I'd ever be able to. "Miles per hour" confused me. I was still getting used to the concept of an "hour," which I now knew was sixty minutes, a minute made up of sixty seconds. I also knew that in the Cartesian War in the 4560's (three-hundred years before the modern day), 800,000 soldiers were killed in one battle on Hithway Day. Jared knew none of this, but there was no way I could tell him.

"I'll call Marcia Spelling," he said, "and ask _her _if she knows the answers."

I doubted it, because Marcia Spelling was the dumbest girl in class. But I just said, "See you tomorrow," and hung up.

Nora was behind me. "Now about the toilet…" she said.

"I'm going, I'm going."

I cleaned her toilet miserably. If only there was a way I could show Jared that I wasn't stupid, that I did know things.

Just when I was coming up with some kind of plan, my hand touched something hairy behind Nora's toilet. I screamed.


	3. Chapter 2

**El Spithor Vulthus (In the Belly of the Beast)**

**Chapter Two**

Nora came rushing to the bathroom, thrusting the door open. "What are you screaming about?"

I backed away from the toilet. "There's something hairy—" I said, pointing.

My sister looked at me like I was crazy. But she watched the bottom of the toilet for a second, while I stood there frozen. And out came…Nora's guinea pig.

"Flufftop!" she exclaimed, picking it up. "I've been looking everywhere for you! It's time for you to get a ride on the ceiling fan."

As she left the bathroom, she whispered in my ear, "I can't believe you were frightened of a guinea pig. You need to get some nerves, Sherri."

I went back to my room and kicked over my stack of comic books. I had started collecting them ever since I arrived here from Pacifico a year ago. But now I was frustrated. My comics spilled over my floor, and I made a vow not to clean my room till Christmas. Then I saw that the first comic book that had remained in the stack I had kicked over was _Killer Hamster._

_Killer Hamster _happened to be my favorite comic series of all. The protagonist is a homicidial maniac named Alfic who used to be human, but was turned into a hamster by Dr. Benedict, who had promised that together they would become Masters of the Universe. Dr. Benedict was found dead two days after the experiment, and no scientist could discover the cause. He did have marks of a rodent on his neck, though. Alfic had bitten off an arsenic tablet, which does not affect hamsters, and immediately clamped his teeth into the traitor's nape. Sometimes Alfic kills good people, sometimes bad. But the goal of the comic books is to make you cheer for Alfic, no matter how much you care about his victims.

I chose to read this edition of _Killer Hamster, _dated from four months ago. In this one, Alfic kills an old lady in a shopping mall because he caught her stealing from a gumball machine. He has sympathy for the gumball machine, and after the old lady dies, he says, "Now you should have enough contents to woo another gumball machine. Invite me to your wedding, why don't you?"

When I finished the comic, I felt better. I began work on the history assignment, but soon gave it up for a lost cause. How could anyone expect me to learn the history of Earth's people when I wasn't even _born _here?

Nora struggled even harder than I did in school. But it didn't matter, for she was prettier than me, both as a human and as a Cadowight. For Cadowights (the most intelligent beings on Pacifico), having three horns, unblemished orange skin, and purple irises made you a dream catch for anyone of the opposite gender. Nora possessed all of these attractive features. I, however, only had two horns, there were green spots all over my flesh (they would've turned black in a couple of years), and yellow irises. There were few female Cadowights uglier than myself at school. I and my friend Marroc sometimes wished we had been plain, rather than ugly. Plainness, albeit unpleasant in itself, is not something you want to turn you eyes away from. It's not particularly wonderful to look at, but neither is it horrible. Vacor Primwoss Chaplain Imisoc Jortwon Illyan Dot, who had five-hundred names in all, was the plainest Cadowight I ever met, and I remember one time Maddoc wrote a note to Vacor begging her to switch bodies with her. This actually could be done on Pacifico, but not on Earth, as I have learnt. Vacor spit in my friend's face.

"Time for dinner!" Mom shouted, as I finished page 23 of _Lust for Magic, _the book I had to read for English. It was finally getting interesting, and I loathed being interrupted. But Mom would cause me to dream of raining bananas if I didn't eat now, and I wanted to have a normal dream that night. So I put a bookmark in _Lust for Magic _and ambled downstairs.

We had spaghetti and cheeseballs that night. All three of us were allergic to the flesh of Earthian animals. We learned this on our first day on Earth, when we went to a Wataburger. Nora and I had to go the hospital for a couple of days; we couldn't stop vomiting. For Mom, the effect of meat is less potent, though still horrid. Further, it doesn't matter whether its beef or chicken, but us Malices break out in hives.

"Did you manage to keep our secret for one more day?" Since Mom asked this question every night for a year, it was a sort of a joke now.

"I have not told anyone since Lisa Stotson last April," Nora said. Her friend Lisa had actually pried the information out of her, and the next day she went around telling the school that Nora was insane. Nora broke Lisa's back in a swimming pool two months later, and Lisa never spoke of her again. Nobody cared anyway; Nora was too pretty for it to matter.

"Even Jared doesn't know, Mom, and he's my best friend," I said, just like I said every night.

"Good. I still fear the day when one of us tells where we came from and the listener actually _believes."_

"It doesn't make any sense to me," I reflected, "that humans are so loath to believe the truth."

"Do you know that most American children your age would not know how to use the word 'loath' in a sentence? Heck, from my studies, most children _Nora's _age wouldn't know how to use that word."

"Mother, your sociological work impresses me," Nora said sarcastically.

"Nora, you know why we are here. To study the Earthlings and bring back data to FARLO. Cadowights know 90% of every word in their country's national language by the time they are eleven, whereas septuagenarian Americans on average don't know even 70% of their language."

"Mom, you are a fount of knowledge," I said, finishing the last cheeseball on my plate. "What's for dessert?"

"Cactus Flavored Ice-Cream." Mom picked up our plates and carried them to the sink.

"Mom, that's ridiculous."

"Hello?" said Nora, looking at me. "Earth to Sherri? Mother was simply punning. In English, the words 'desert' and 'dessert' are only one letter and one accent in difference. And of course, on Earth deserts are strange places were it only rains once a year."

"I know what a desert is, Nora! I also know that you have a crush on Penguin Reddox!"

"His name isn't Penguin. It's Benjamin."

"He dresses in that odd outfit that makes him look like a penguin, and—"

"It's called a tux, you moron! If you'd just assimilate into Earthian culture—"

"Girls, stop bickering! Go fill a bowl with ice cream and eat it before it melts."

Nora and I went over to the kitchen counter, pushing and shoving one another. We grabbed some bowls from the cabinet, and spoons from a drawer. Then we turned to the ice cream carton, only to find a cactus in it instead of mint chocolate chip Blue Bell.


	4. Chapter 3

**El Sptihor Vulthus (In the Belly of the Beast)**

**Chapter Three**

"Mom, uh…is this a joke?" I asked.

"No, sweetheart. Cacti are actually tasty to Cadowights."

Nora walked over to the table and looked Mom in the eye. "Mother, we are not Cadowights now; we're human. And the human tongue is not fit for anything prickly."

"Oh, come on. Humans just _think _they can't eat this stuff. I'll prove it to you." She stuck a fork in the piece of cactus that was in her bowl. Then she brought it to her lips and took a big bite. "Ow!" she shouted, running to the bathroom. Half an hour later I walked pass the bathroom door and heard Mom's reflection giving her instructions on where to direct the tweezers to pull needles out of her tongue.

I went back to reading _Lust for Magic _until it was time for bed. I dreamt a giant spider chased me into a lion's den. When I awoke, I thought how odd it was that I had a dream of Earthian animals; on Pacifico, we had nothing like spiders or lions. I missed my pet zangerbang, which was yellow and scaly, had a hump on its back and a tail about six feet high that was always in the air. Zangerbang racing was common in my old neighborhood. My zangerbang, Mozzie, won second place in a race during my tenth year. Ah, those were the days…

After eating a breakfast of peanut butter on Eggo waffles, I waited for the bus to come. When it arrived, I hopped on and sat down next to a boy named Spazz, since Jared had a different route.

Spazz was playing a game on a Nintendo DS. I looked over his shoulder. There were some strange creatures doing battle. I stared. One of them looked like a fooliwant.

"Hey, where'd you find a game with a Pacificoran animal on it?"

Spazz gave me a funny look. "Pacificoran? Does that refer to some kind of game that hasn't been released yet? I'll store it in my photographic memory and google it later."

I slapped my forehead. Of course there'd be nothing Pacificoran in an Earthian video game. But I needed to correct my error. "What is that?"

"You've never played Pokemon before? You're weird. See, I'm using this wolf critter called Lucario…he's Psychic and Steel type. But if you don't know anything about Pokemon, that won't make sense to you. And this thing I'm fighting is called Mamoswine."

"It's not…a fooliwant, then?"

"A fooliwhat? Nah. Gosh, you must play obscure games. Video games are my life, and I never heard of a fooliwant."

He went back to his game. I saw the creature that looked like a fooliwant disappear from the screen, and the words, "MAMOSWINE fainted," below it. Then a little round red object appeared, and out of it popped another creature, and at the bottom of the screen were the words, "Kiria sent out LANTURN."

"Nice graphics," I said, though I had little idea what "graphics" were. It was just something a character in a comic book said to a video game designer.

"You really ought to play this game. It's a lot of fun. Next year, Pokemon Bronze and Iron are coming out. I'm hoping Dunsparce gets an evolution."

I had no idea what "Dunsparce" was, nor did I understand the term "evolution." I pulled an Ironman comic out of my backpack. It was the very first Ironman comic, made in July 2009. The two films had preceeded it. _Ironman 3 _was due to come out in 2011.

I had gotten halfway through the comic when we arrived at school. I stuffed it into my backpack and climbed off the bus.

After going through the metal detectors, I walked over to the spot where Jared was waiting. A year ago, I had thought how funny it was that if I had retained my horns when I became human, I would be unable to get through the metal detector safely. Sure, my horns were made of a metal not found on Earth (Mom told me six months ago), but the metal detectors would still recognize them, because they had similarities to Earthian metals.

"Was Marcia any help?" I asked when I reached Jared.

"No. She thought 'War of 1812' was a candy bar."

I laughed, and Jared laughed too. Of course, I didn't know that much about candy here: only last week I learned about 5th Avenue. Personally, I preferred a Milky Way. Nora liked Snickers.

"I hope Ms. Igo doesn't try to teach us trigonometry again," Jared said lamentably. "I don't think we're supposed to learn that until tenth grade."

"'Trig' is short for 'trigonometry', isn't it?"

"Yes. Geez, Sherri, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure that out."

"Well, I was just thinking that my sister Nora is in eleventh grade, and she's taking Trig. I wasn't sure you were talking about the same thing."

"Sherri, you could rival Marcia for a lack of brains. Also, I would appreciate it if you wouldn't bring Nora into every conversation we have. It's annoying." Jared got up and went toward his first period, Physical Education.

I didn't follow him, because my first class was on the opposite side of the building, and I had three minutes to get there. I made it just in time.

Mrs. Holcrust taught General Science for both seventh and eighth graders. She always had her parrot, Imicross, in the room. Before I began seventh grade, I didn't know there were such things as talking birds. Imicross startled me on that first day, so much so that I fainted and spent most of the day in the nurse's office. But I was used to it now.

"Okay, class, today we'll be learning about fungi."

"You mean me?" asked a boy who sat two rows away from me. "I'm a fun guy."

"No, no, Ralph. I mean the phylum which mushrooms and mildews fall under."

"Aren't mushrooms plants?" a girl in front of me wanted to know.

"No, Fungi and Plantae are two different Phyla," said Mrs. Holcrust. "Fungi are defined by the following characteristics. They each have…"

I stopped listening. I had yet to come across a comic book character who had even the slightest interest in science. Even the villains who were scientists didn't care about science at all, only taking over the world. And I labeled anything comic book characters didn't care about "N.M.C.," not my concern. Thankfully, Mom did not care about my low grades in science courses. She said that was to be expected of me, since the scientific facts of planet Pacifico were tremendously different from those of planet Earth. (Mom overlooked the fact that Nora had no trouble in _her _science classes and she obviously was expected to know stuff I didn't. But Mom's mind worked that way; just because one Cadowight-turned-human can learn scientific principles like the back of her own hand, doesn't mean _all _Cadowight-turned-humans can. That's one thing I love about my mom.)

Midway through class, I heard Imicross saying, "Detention for Sherri Malice! Detention for Sherri Malice!"

I looked up at the parrot, then turned to Mrs. Holcrust, who was glaring at me. "What? I didn't do anything."

"That's precisely the problem, Miss Malice. You were woolgathering, and when I asked you to kindly repeat the parts of the mushroom, you didn't hear me. I asked you three times. Because of this, even though I don't want to, I must give you a detention slip." She motioned me to approach her desk. I did, and she handed me the slip. It was pink with a black skull in the background. At the bottom of the slip, three capital blue letters stood out: SAC. I turned to Mrs. Holcrust's face, and was astonished to discover that she seemed very happy indeed to have given the slip to me, contrary to what she had said.

I resumed my seat. The rest of the day went by in a haze. I turned my unfinished history homework in to Mr. Aryoung, and failed his pop quiz. I handed my log journal of what I read in _Lust For Magic _to Ms. Ukulele. I think Ms. Igo tried to teach us how to divide tangent by cosine, whatever those are, until someone in the class pointed out that we were supposed to be learning about converting fractions into percentages. Of course, Earthian math makes no sense to me; only duck mathematics does. (By the way, the "duck" in the title "duck mathematics" has nothing to with the avian species that inhabits Earth's lakes, for obviously there are no ducks on the planet Pacifico. Actually, a "duck" to Cadowights is more like a warehouse. We use duck mathematics to figure out the measurements of a proper warehouse, a selling warehouse, a diving warehouse, a sinking warehouse, a shrinking warehouse, an oblong warehouse, an abstruse warehouse…the list goes on an on.)

By the end of the day I was bum-beat. I wanted to go home and read a few _Killer Hamster _comics to get these stupid facts teachers had been trying to drill into my head all day. But in my last class, Home Ec., Nichole Anderson caught sight of my pink slip. She smiled sweetly at me and said, "I'll escort you to the SAC room, little Sherri." Nichole was five-feet tall, I four and and a half.

I berated myself silently for not having thrown away my detention slip earlier. Sure, I'd be in deeper trouble the next day, but at least that afternoon I would be free for some fun with Alfic. But I had to follow Nichole to the SAC room, or I'd be in trouble so deep that it could fill the Eesymorian Ocean, which Mom tells me is as big as the planet Earth itself.

Nichole opened the door to the SAC room and peered in. "Oh, Mr. Vortex, I found a girl with a pink slip. Shall I bring her in?"

"Please do."

Nichole dug her long fingernails into my arm as she dragged me inside. "Give Mr. Vortex your pink slip!" she barked. I obeyed, wincing from the pain in my arm.

"Yes," said Mr. Vortex. "Have a seat. You may go, Miss Anderson."

Nichole gave me a falsely sweet smile as she released my arm and hurried out of the room. A couple of boys entered, and each handed Mr. Vortex their detention slips. Then three girls came in and did the same. After a few more minutes, nobody new arrived. Mr. Vortex went over to the door and locked it. Then he said, in a low voice, so that most of the others had to strain to hear it (though not me, since I still retained my Cadowight senses), "Partner up quickly. Each pair will be going to a different dimension, where you will be forced to face a test. Not those pathetic pen-and-paper tests you're used to. No, you will be given a _practical _examination, with what I call _real value. _The only trouble is, you may not survive."


	5. Chapter 4

**El Spithor Vulthus (In the Belly of the Beast)**

**Chapter Four**

"_You may not survive." _These words rang in my head. This had to be a joke. Surely it was illegal for the school to deliver detentions that could result in a student's death? My misdemeanor wasn't worth dying for, after all. Science bored me. Big whoop. The other kids, I'm sure, must've done far worse deeds than I did. I wanted to cry out, "Exempt me from this task! I'm innocent!" But I would sound older than myself, which is not a wise thing on Earth, though on planet Pacifico one would get praised for precocity. Furthermore, none of the other five would want to be my partner, and I might be forced to face the unknown alone, which was worse than going with someone else. So I stayed silent.

The two boys naturally chose each other for company. Due to the fact that they seemed nonplussed at Mr. Vortex' instructions, I thought that maybe they were regulars and had done this before. Which, more significantly, meant they had _survived. _So I had nothing to worry about.

One of the girls came over to me. I gasped in horror when I saw it was Marcia Spelling.

"Wanna be partners?" she asked.

"Not really," I said, not caring about her hurt expression.

'Well, it looks like you have no choice," she said, as the other two girls stepped toward Mr. Vortex, who handed them a card. The boys held a card as well. I sighed and went with Marcia toward Mr. Vortex, and Marcia took the card he offered.

"Now, everyone, place your card on a desk. Both partners must have one index finger touching the card. Do this now, please." He made sure all of us had obeyed our instructions. "Marcia, that's not your index finger. That's your pinkie."

Marcia blushed. I showed her which one was the index, feeling upset that I had to go to another dimension and hope to survive with a dumb girl for a partner.

"Now, I will blow this horn," Mr. Vortex said, holding up a trumpet, "and you will end up in an alternate dimension. You will spend two hours there, after which your detention will be over and you will be able to go home. Oh, and one last thing. Don't think of taking your finger off the card the second before you here the trumpet. Not only will you be sending someone partnerless into a dangerous dimension, but I have a spare card to send you to a place where you have no chance of survival _at all." _

I cursed under my breath, for I had planned to do exactly that. Mr. Vortex blew the trumpet, and I felt as though I were sinking into quicksand, though at the rate I was sinking, normal quicksand ought to be called "slowsand." I shut my eyes tightly, and a minute later I felt as though I had just fallen out of a tree.

I opened my eyes and let out a scream. Where my human hands had been before, I now had orange cylinders with green splotches on them, and long claws where I formerly had fingers. There was a puddle of water nearby and I peered at my reflection. I had two horns, and my irises were yellow. Great. I was my old ugly self again.

"Ack!" said a voice from nearby. "Monster!"

I turned to look at Marcia. But there was no human anywhere. All I saw was a mallard duck-like creature with wheels instead of feet. It started rolling away from me as soon as it caught my eye looking at it. I followed it.

"No! I don't want to die this way! That traitor Sherri, letting me come to this dimension alone…"

I laughed, though it sounded unlike human laughter. (After all, I was a Cadowight.) It was obvious to me what had happened. When Marcia and I came to this other dimension, we took on different forms. I wondered why I was a Cadowight, though. Pacifico wasn't in other dimension; only another galaxy. And how could a random high school teacher or disciplinarian or whatever Mr. Vortex was, have a gateway to Pacifico, anyhow?

When I had paused to reflect, I had stopped in my tracks. I looked about me, and saw I was standing on a beach that certainly wasn't on Pacifico. For one thing, I saw a few red crablike creatures burrowing in the sand, and no such animal existed on my home planet, as far as I knew. Secondly, the sun that spread light over the beach wasn't the Gorbal Jutii. This sun as red, ours on Pacifico blue. Furthermore, that green whirlwind moving across the sea was nothing like any of the storms I had ever heard of. Wait…green whirlwind?

I checked. It was coming toward the beach. I had to get out of there fast. I started running away from the ocean, in the direction of some oddly-shaped trees. It looked like their roots were where there leaves should be, and their leaves and branches against the ground. Some of the roots spiraled upward, and others went downward to provide a cage around the leaves. And an animal's face seemed to be carved in each tree, though this wasn't an animal that I recognized.

Then I remembered Marcia. I figured she had rolled pretty far away from me, since I hadn't thought of her for ten minutes or so. I looked in the direction she had been heading. Surprisingly, she wasn't far off. I went over to her and discovered that she had tripped over her new wheels. Like the not-so-malicious Malice I was, I picked her up and started running.

"Let me go, you beast!" she breathed.

"Marcia, it's me, Sherri," I said, without stopping.

"I don't believe you."

"Doesn't my voice sound like Sherri's?"

"Maybe you gain the power to imitate the voices of those you have eaten."

"I thought you said you believed Sherri abandoned you at the last minute, taking her index finger off the card just as Mr. Vortex blew the horn?"

"Hmmm…you know about Mr. Vortex? Then you must be Sherri." I was glad to see that Marcia was intelligent enough to reach this conclusion. "So…we changed into different creatures when we came to this dimension?"

"It seems so," I said. We had now reached the trees. I put Marcia down and turned to watch the progress of the green whirlwind. It had reached the beach, and was coming right towards us.

"Uh, Sherri?"

"What, Marcia?"

"You might want to look at this." She was facing not the beach, but the trees. I turned around. The roots of the trees were swaying in different directions. The part of the roots that had served as a cage for the leaves and branches now separated, and blue creatures were coming out of them. These beasts had wings and looked a lot like birds, except that their beaks were shaped like scissors. I picked Marcia up again and started running. I heard the scissor-beaks chasing after us, and out of the corner of my eye I saw the whirlwind change direction.

One of the scissor-beaks got close, aiming for my eye. I thrust my horns at it, and they made short work of the menace. Another scissor-beak aimed for Marcia's unprotected neck, but I bent my head down in time to kill this one, too. The remaining scissor-beaks tried to come up with new plans to harm us as I ran. One of them came straight for my arm. I decided to try something. Holding Marcia up so that the scissor-beak would stick its weapon in her wheel, I hoped that it would work. It did. The scissor-beak got caught, and, try as it might, it couldn't shake itself free. Marcia's wheels were made of wood, and I knew that the properties of wood made it a stronghold against scissors.

Unfortunately, Marcia's wheels weren't that big, and there was no way I could trap other scissor-beaks that way. I also had to worry about the whirlwind which was gaining on us. I ran faster, Marcia screaming, "I don't want to die!" It came to my intention that the scissor-beak was hurting her; the wooden wheel was a part of her skin. I decided there was a way to relieve her of her pain. I breathed on the scissor-beak in the way Mom had taught me when I was six. In seconds, the scissor-beak turned into a vanilla likeness of itself. I took a bite out of its beak. It was the best-tasting vanilla creature I had ever made. I continued consuming until the entire scissor-beak was gone. Then I licked my lips.

One of the other scissor-beaks stuck itself in my back, causing me to howl in rage. I put Marcia down and rolled over a few times, until I was certain the beast was dead. It didn't take away the pain, though. I looked at Marcia, whose neck was about to be pierced by a scissor-beak. Without thinking, I breathed like I did before, turning this creature into vanilla. I wasn't hungry anymore, though, so I left it and took off with Marcia.

A moment later I reached the edge of the beach. There was no landscape at all, except black grass, which I was afraid of. On the planet Pacifico, black grass is a sure sign that you'll encounter the Hithocorpus, a three-humped mammal that feeds on Cadowight horns. As I've noted before, the more horns a Cadowight has, the prettier she is. (Male Cadowights have no horns.) Having two horns instead of three is a characteristic of ugliness. I already had only two horns, but with only one I'd be even uglier.

There were two things, though. First, I was certain this wasn't planet Pacifico, so I needn't have worried about running into a Hithocorpus. But more importantly, though my physique in this dimension was exactly like what I was on Pacifico, I had a feeling that if some part of my skin were altered in any way, it would not be different on my home planet. So even if a Hithocorpus did take one of my horns, I shouldn't care. The only thing to worry about in that situation would be if Nora ever saw me. I wouldn't be able to live it down.

I heard Marcia screaming and turned around. The scissor-beaks were being sucked into the whirlwind. I knew there was only one thing to do: face my fears and step onto the black grass.


	6. Chapter 5

**El Spithor Vulthus (In the Belly of the Beast)**

**Chapter Five**

I took a tentative step forward. For some reason, I felt nothing under my foot. But Marcia's continued yells reminded me that I had more important things to worry about. I put my other foot on the black grass.

And fell…and fell…and fell.

After what felt like twenty minutes, my feet finally touched something solid. Oddly enough, I did not change position while I was falling, nor when I landed. It was like there was a sudden loss of gravity.

I tried to look about, but it was all dark. Marcia had ceased shrieking. Briefly, I wished I could turn into a Vinswayon carbor, a reptile that could see in the dark. Then, I noticed a lambent glow emanating from a distant source ahead. I advanced toward it.

I was almost there, when something came down on me. I dropped Marcia, who squealed in fright as I tried to get whatever was on top of me off. Then, lights appeared all over the room, and I realized that a net now trapped Marcia and me.

Marcia tried to peck at the net, the ends of which were wrapped around some tables. I had to duck as I went toward the tables and attempted to lift them, to no avail.

"That won't work. The tables are glued to the floor," said a voice that startled me.

I jumped to my feet, only to fall back down since the net did not allow me to stand up straight, except in the very middle, and I was on one of its edges. Undaunted, I looked around for the speaker, and saw a slim human (or so he appeared) wearing purple robes and a ski mask. "Who are you?" I asked.

"Oh, my name is of no importance to you," he said. "But I will tell you _what _I am. You see standing before you a sturnrat. I exist in every dimension, and on every habitable planet. On Pacifico, I am called the Hithocorpus. On Earth, I am something far worse."

I gasped. To think that Mom was right all along! The black grass led me into a trap set by the Hithocorpus…instinctively, my cylindrical upper limbs grabbed hold of my horns. I couldn't bear the thought of being any uglier than I already was.

"It seems you have come on a feast day," the sturnrat said.

"You want my horn," I said, quietly.

"Oh, no, Cadowight. You're ugly enough as it is. In fact, I would prefer you to permit me give you the one thing you've always wanted, the ability to have your ugliness invisible to everybody else."

"You'd do that?" I was ready to thank the Hithocorpus for being so generous.

"Sure! All it would take is for you to climb into my mouth, when we meet either on Earth or Pacifico, and I'll swallow you. No one will see your ugliness if you're in my belly."

This made me so angry that I wanted to drill my horn into him. Then I thought, _I can use my horns to break out of this net! _I brought them upwards and tried to use them like knives. Nothing happened.

"Ah, foolish Cadowight. My net is too strong for your horns. And even if you were able to escape, you'd have to fight me. And I wouldn't lose."

_You would if I turned you into vanilla, _I thought.

"Anyhow, for the feast," continued the strunrat, "I only want to eat the little ducky-girl here. You, Cadowight, can go home free, for today."

The sturnrat pulled out his (its?) own knife and began cutting part of the net. Without thinking, I turned my horns on the sturnrat's hands. It laughed, a cold hard laugh that shook my nerves. "Cadowight, you amuse me. Your horns hurt me not at all. Even if you had _three _of them, they would give me no pain."

This hurt me, for it was another slight on my ugliness. I then breathed seductively on his hands. But they didn't turn to vanilla, and this gave the sturnrat an opportunity to stab my tongue with its knife. I yelped in pain, but he or it or whatever just kept laughing.

Once the hole was big enough to pull Marcia through, the sturnrat tossed aside its knife. Then it reached in for Marcia, but she rolled away. The sturnrat would have to cut another hole.

But he didn't. He just pulled something out of one of his pockets, slipping it on his finger. It was a ring, and Marcia was bedazzled by it, for even as a duck with wheels, she still could not resist jewelry. She rolled toward it, hypnotized.

I had to do something quick, for I didn't want her to be eaten by the sturnrat. If I had to eat her myself, it would be better. So I did the one thing I could think of. I breathed seductively on her, causing her to turn into vanilla.

"Curse you, Cadowight! How did you know that my species can't eat vanilla?"

"I didn't," I said. "I would've taken a bite out of her before you grabbed her, but only as a vanilla beast."

"You actually would've eaten her?" The sturnrat snarled. "Darn it. If I had known that, I would've pretended I could eat vanilla for a few seconds, so that you would've snapped at her for nothing. But no matter," it said, and I could hear it smiling from behind its ski mask. "What you have done is irreversible. _Somebody _will eat her. And I will eat you, sooner or later."

I gulped. Then rage entered my throat, and I would've released it verbally, but I felt a tingling sensation coursing through my body. This time I felt like I was being dragged upward. Two minutes later, I was on the SAC floor, and the human Marcia was next to me, only she was still vanilla.

Mr. Vortex looked around the room. "Look's like only five made it back." One of the boys was missing "But," he stared at Marcia, "what happened here? Miss Malice, please explain."


End file.
